'All year long the war drums have been beating an insistent tattoo but recently the rhythm seemed to be leading nowhere.'

'His heart pounded quickly, beating out a fierce tattoo in his strong chest as he walked down the paths which wound and turned into dead ends.'

'He launches himself into my lap and rains kisses on me, his tail beating a tattoo on the arm of my chair.'

'But to my surprise, instead he got out a battered pair of drumsticks, with which he beat a brief tattoo on the top of my head.'

Pronunciation /taˈtuː//təˈtuː/verb

Mark (a part of the body) with an indelible design by inserting pigment into punctures in the skin.

'Pre-wedding nerves can sometimes cause a groom to have a total sense of humour failure when a harmless little prank - shaving his eyebrows, say, or tattooing his cheeks - is played on him.'

'In Jack's eyes, his mom was unique among tattoo artists because she'd never been tattooed.'

'The other option would be to tattoo the backs of my hands.'

'On the street in many an American city, teenage girls have taken to wearing a Hindu-style ‘dot’ between their eyes, and boys to tattooing themselves with Chinese characters they cannot read.'

'The entire right side of her body was tattooed with road burn and hues of purple, yellow, and blue.'

'The four defendants were charged for tattooing their bodies to evade conscription immediately after they were judged physically competent to serve in the military.'

'Often people come in with really ugly designs and insist that he tattoo them.'

'On her right arm, starting from her shoulder, her skin was tattooed with black liquid crystal as a snake curling around her arm.'

'Without exception they paint their bodies, they tattoo their bodies, they decorate their bodies and they clothe their bodies.'

'Parents would rather their kids go in for glitter as they feel it is a better option to piercing or tattooing the body.'

'he has a heart tattooed on his left hand'

'He did everything short of tattooing the organization's logo on his forehead.'

'He escaped lifelong identification as an SS member only because by late 1944 the regiments were no longer organised to carry out the customary process of tattooing conscripts' blood group on their arms.'

'He has a tattoo on his left hand and a cross tattooed on one of his left fingers.'

'Iverson famously gave himself the sobriquet ‘The Answer’, tattooing the words on his left arm for emphasis.'

'If this whole admission game does happen again, though, I plan on permanently tattooing the word REJECT on my forehead.'

'‘It's the only brand name riders will actually tattoo onto their arms,’ Ghattas goes on to indicate.'

'At twenty-one, Dami turned him into a vampire, and tattooed a red mark onto his forehead.'

noun

A design made by tattooing.

'The tattoos showed courage because tattooing is painful, wealth because the tattoo expert was expensive, and beauty because tattooing made the wearer attractive to women.'

'A few dark tattoos in strange patterns were visible along the base of her spine.'

'While the appearance and garb of Samoan women are subject to a range of cultural restrictions, full-body tattoos are common on Samoan men.'

'Jacek was sitting at his desk, sketching out a pattern for a tribal tattoo.'

'Surrounding her right eye was a yellow tattoo of a hawk's head.'

'On his upper arm he had a tattoo - a simple red band around his arm.'

'Most of the traditional tattoos such as patterns of lotus, snake, figures of deities, or religious symbol were mostly etched for religious or spiritual purposes.'

'Cholos often have black ink tattoos, commonly involving Catholic imagery, or calligraphy messages or family names.'

'We must be prepared for all possibilities, not just the ones that play into reporters' preconceived notions about hunters, soldiers, tattoos and guns.'

'Teah, 24, a Lieutenant-Colonel, has tattoos of a scorpion and a cobra on each bicep.'

More definitions

1. the act or practice of marking the skin with indelible patterns, pictures, legends, etc., by making punctures in it and inserting pigments.